One of the nation’s foremost legal commentators and podcasters, Dahlia Lithwick, will return to Charlottesville on Sept. 22, to talk about her new book.
“Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America” tells the story of the women lawyers who led high-profile battles against racism, sexism and xenophobia exhibited by Donald Trump’s presidency, and won.
Lithwick, who lived in Charlottesville from 2000 to 2017, will speak at Piedmont Virginia Community College’s Dickinson Auditorium, 501 College Drive, at 6:45 p.m. Arranged by the Charlottesville Democratic Committee, she will discuss the book with Amy Woolard, Chief Program Officer for the ACLU of Virginia. The evening will include a question-and-answer session with the audience.
Free and open to the public, registration is not required for attendance. “Lady Justice” will be published September 20, 2022.
After Trump won the presidency in 2016 over Hillary Clinton, women lawyers across the United States began to take action to resist the efforts of Trump, Mitch McConnell, and other Republicans to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image. “Lady Justic” tells the story of how the women worked for four years “to hold the line against the most chaotic and malign presidency in living memory,” a press release stated.
Women featured in the book include Stacey Abrams fighting for voting rights in Georgia, Robbie Kaplan taking on the “Unite the Right” perpetrators of violence in Charlottesville, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates refusing to implement Pres. Trump’s “Muslim Ban” and human rights attorney Becca Heller organizing lawyers at airports to fight it, and the ACLU’s Brigitte Amiri, who defended abortion rights of immigrant minors in detention.
Charlottesville is Lithwick’s second stop on her national book tour after the tour is launched in Washington, D.C. the night before. After Charlottesville, Lithwick, who is the senior legal correspondent at Slate, a news and politics analyst at MSNBC, and host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning, biweekly podcast about the law, will go to New York.
Lithwick was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2018, and was the recipient of a 2013 National Magazine Award for her columns on the Affordable Care Act.